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Do you ever feel totally ashamed for things that you've done, and said, before you were aware of how your TRauma affected you?
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This was actually a big part of processing my own trauma, in a way.
Right around the time I finished processing the bulk of my trauma, I was confronted with my own toxic behavior in a big way. To make a very long story as short as possible, I was 3 years into my first ever relationship with a healthy, decent person, and he'd had enough of my insanity. Just trust me when I say it was warranted.
This kind of set in motion me realizing just how toxic I really was. My therapist and I called it "toxic behavior patterns" because it focused on the behaviors themselves, rather than me as a person.
So, this is what I learned. When you're dealing with toxic and abusive people, you can't engage with them in a healthy way. Being raised in a toxic and abusive environment, I had to develop toxic behavior patterns as a means of getting my needs met and staying (relatively) safe. Things like blame shifting, a thing that still kind of smarts a bit, when I wanted to maneuver the pain onto one of my siblings. Extreme defensiveness, a way to protect my most vulnerable parts from the insults of my parents. More complicated things like manipulating my parents into giving me food by feigning being sick.
And by the time I became an adult, those behaviors - those patterns - were so baked in, and so normalized, I didn't even realize I was engaging in them, and definitely didn't know they weren't normal or healthy.
Something I also realized, as I was unpacking all this, this was probably a big reason why I was never able to get close to healthy people. I didn't "speak their language" because I was used to unhealthy ways to engage with people. This was a really painful realization for me.
But... The thing is, I am not my behavior, and my behavior isn't some unchangeable, intrinsic part of me. Those toxic behaviors, those patterns, were faulty programming, installed by faulty operators - my parents. I consider them to be at least partly at fault for all those toxic years. They made me, and made me that way.
The thing about accountability is, it has layers. The outer layer, the one where you apologize to people you've harmed, is the one where you don't justify or make excuses for what you've done. And the inner layer, the one where you look closely at what created the circumstances for the harm you caused, so that you can avoid causing the same harm in the future.
Our abusers make us believe we are our mistakes, but they couldn't be more wrong. The mistakes I've made, the toxic behavior I've engaged in, were a product of the environment that created my trauma, and once I was aware of these things, I was able to fix them. And I promise you can too ❤️
Layers of accountability - thank you. I'm trying to figure out how to finally take honest accountability for the toxic behaviours I acted out for so many years in my relationship while still holding on to self compassion, since I don't want to fall into my toxic shame pit again.
Your comment somehow made something click. It's so hard to acknowledge having somehow repeated the cycle, even if in a "less evil" version.